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Event Detail

Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Energy Politics: After Carbon Democracy

Abstract: Professor Mitchell will lead a discussion on the themes
raised in his recent book Carbon Democracy. He will share his
thoughts as they have developed after completing that book and will
reflect on the forms of politics that may arise in tandem with
future energy transitions. Biography: Timothy Mitchell is Professor
and Chair of the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and
African Studies at Columbia University. His books include
Colonising Egypt (1991), exploring the emergence of the modern
state in the colonial period and the forms of reason, power and
knowledge that define the experience of modernity; Rule of Experts:
Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (2002), drawing on his work in
Egypt to examine the making of “the economy” and “the market” as
objects of twentieth-century politics and the wider role of expert
knowledge in the formation of the contemporary state; and Carbon
Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (2011), arguing that
no nation escapes the political consequences of our collective
dependence on oil and that the politics of the West have become
dependent on an undemocratic Middle East.